It was just after 2 a.m. on a pitch-black Friday morning when Bernadette Greene-Placentia’s life changed. The Democratic candidate for Congressional District 8 strolled across a parking lot to repair a damaged campaign sign. It was a routine she’d followed all summer. This time, she only made it a few yards.
An attacker smashed her over the head. She blacked out. She woke up to find a strange man on top of her.
Greene-Placentia struggled to open her eyes. She felt a sharp pain below her waist. The attacker was pulling his penis out of her.
She heard him mumble something like, “-ic bitch, not a very good fuck,” which her mind filled in as “Democratic bitch,” she recalled. She wasn’t sure that was exactly what he said.
One leg was out of her jean capris. She wore brand-new tennis shoes and a campaign t-shirt. Another man came over. Greene-Placentia felt his weight nudging her left leg further apart. She began swinging her foot at him. “Not even worth it,” she heard the man say as he moved away. He wore black boots and had small feet, she recalled.
The two men left Greene-Placentia face down in the parking lot. The hatch of her silver Jeep Grand Cherokee was still open. The car was still running. She heard music.
She doesn’t remember pulling up her pants or picking herself off the asphalt parking lot. She doesn’t remember closing her Jeep’s hatch and putting her foot on the gas. She doesn’t remember pulling her car into the driveway and collapsing into her bed.
“It’s just these little tiny flashes of things that I do remember,” Greene-Placentia said in an interview with Phoenix New Times. “As much as I don’t want to remember, I’ve tried very, very hard to remember more stuff. But that’s where I’m at.”
wow, I don’t think people like this can be repaired. They should be locked away for life (with minimal comforts, basically a monk like life) and that energy should be spent on their kids and younger generation. Except ofcourse we are talking about the Trump administration, Trump probably thinks she got what she deserved. So yeah, quite hopeless.
I believe in rehabilitative and restorative justice. But a necessary prerequisite for them to work is that the guilty understand what they did was wrong and want to change. Rapists, much like domestic abusers, in our society very rarely feel that desire.
Someone who would do something like this has something seriously wrong with him, but it seems to me like it may be more likely to be an illness of society that he’s symptomatic of rather than an individual mental illness. He needs to be kept under control for the safety of others until we can find a way to make people like him eligible for restorative justice, which I doubt he will live to see.
This is the kind of rape which coldly reminds you that there are levels even within this kind of monstrosity. And as you yourself alluded in other posts, this particular person seems to be on the worst level of it, or close to. I do agree that it might have a perfectly reasonable and even sympathizable explanation, for instance perhaps he was regularly sexually abused by a parent when he was a kid and thinks that rape is some sort of punishment (which also counts as a societial source too). But unfortunately I find it hard to believe that there is a turning point from this sort of mental ilness/character once you are elbow deep in it. The only reasonable way forward for me is to change the society by conditioning younger generations and saving them from abuse, not spending time and energy on individuals that are too deep in such a pit.
I want to be clear about what I meant by social illness. It is an illness of the society which manifests in the behaviors and values of people, fascism being the prime example. I think these men (read the article and it’s actually two men) have been radicalized to the point where they are acting in a complete incongruity with near universal understanding of right and wrong. And in that vein the systems to rehabilitate them are ones that we need to build for the people less radicalized than them. The same applies for dealing with rape culture in general. The difference between these men and your everyday rapist or everyday far right chud engaging in stochastic terrorism seem to me to be ones of magnitude, not kind.
I agree with your perspective, my problem has always been that people can be very deceptive. How would this system potentially deal with that? Asking because I like your idea and just haven’t been able to head-solve that part.
I don’t know. Even communities committed to restorative justice have broken stairs. But just because there are still issues doesn’t mean we should give up the pursuit of a better and more just system. Issues like this are part of why it’d be stupid for a large government to just adopt what some communes and anarchists are trying, but taking elements, working towards similar aims, and encouraging such radical and voluntary groups to keep trying to innovate and find solutions are things we can do now
Agreed, even a half step is better than none in the right direction. It’s a worthwhile pursuit to spend time figuring it out. I don’t see any benefit in inflicting pain and suffering on someone as retribution or “teaching”. The system is deeply flawed as it stands now, there’s an endless number of things to be fixed. I have no idea what an ultimate solution might look like (not as a monolith but a process over time) but I have faith it can exist. I’ll take being proven wrong over giving up.
You have hope and it’s a bit infectious. Kinda need as much of that as I can get these days. Thank you for responding, I appreciate it
I strongly believe it lies in education. Sex education, reading from different perspectives, understanding what consent is and is not, understanding empathy. We need to be teaching our youth the value of respect and consent. They need to read books written by women from the perspective of women. We need to teach them that women deserve a place in our government, our universities, everywhere.
There’s proof there that we can create a better society for everyone this way.
Even if our pursuit is doomed I believe we still owe it to ourselves and each other to work for a better world. It’s both a matter of practicality and a matter of character. Surely things can be done better, but also we must every day choose who we will be, we choose the contents of our souls continually, and since we choose we can choose better, and when we don’t know what choice is better we can do our best and try to learn where we can.
I choose hope because we are people, even when things are bleak, and people can change. We can innovate. We can reorganize. We can learn and choose better. Perfect is impossible, but better always is possible.
Two books I recommend for hope are The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow, which show that society has been organized wildly differently in the past in ways most people don’t know because it’s relatively recent archeological and anthropological knowledge, but also it goes against the two competing “common knowledge” accounts of how civilization got to be this way. And The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuinn (cw the protagonist does rape someone), which imagines an anarchic society, struggles and all, which feels very real and like it may someday be possible, especially to those who’ve had plenty of experience in anarchy adjacent communities, spaces, and projects.
I don’t think they should be in prison; wood chipper.
while I would agree for this particular crime, in general death sentence is very problematic. I have read somewhere that during certain periods as high as 1/20 death sentences can be wrongfully given. So I am ok if they live like monks in some tiny cell for the rest of their lives while wrongfully accused people at least get some chance for getting out and compensation (which is not ideal but way better than death I would assume).
I’m not a fan of giving the government the power to execute people either, but man I understand why people want it when stuff like this happens. I still think it’s the wrong decision but I can’t get mad at people who support the death penalty.
The solution to that is death penalty for the people who decide on it but are wrong, but this needs to come along with a robust all encompassing government whistleblower program as well as stricter rules on government officials and more forced transparency.
In the day an age of being able to deep fake convincing evidence on a whim, I dont think the government should have the power to kill anyone. Period.
Plus, death is too easy. Watching the world move without you in it though…
Reread the second half of my comment, those parts are necessary for the first part to even be imagined as remotely functional. Full forced transparency, no classified information, absolutely nothing can be hidden from the civilians (a necessary yet ALWAYS ignored part of democracy btw) on top of extreme protections for whistleblowers and a massive payout system for anybody who catches any wrongdoings by the government.
And you missed mine.
That its impossible to hold anyone to the standard you propose, because to allow it all, means it can be manipulated for others purpose.
Why give the execution power to someone else?
That’s such a wildly disingenuous question. You know the answer but just in case you are being serious then consider “Why give the incarceration power to someone else”. Surely you aren’t arguing for absolute anarchism and rampant vigilantism, right?
Anyway, back to the original point…it’s not impossible if all government correspondence and data is fully public and never hidden along with a robust whistleblower system. We have to do something with the Epsteins,Trumps, Netanyahus, and Putins of the world…why continue allowing them to take more from us all by incarcerating them where they also have the chance to return to their old heinous lives or even to just move the entire operation into their “prison cell”.
I genuinely want to know your view point.
And after that, is a good example of a slippery slope argument. Which is to say, no I’m not.
But you wanna know what’s reversible? Incarceration. We can give money and an apology. You wanna know what you can’t undo? Death.
So to me, unless you have a system that can promises 100% guilty people are guilty, even with people using the system with dishonest intents, than no, Im not on board with the government killing anyone.
So why should we keep those people locked up? Because I dont want to give that much power to an entitity that is currently killing and raping trans siblings in prison. Never mind if they legally can kill them all.
Tl; Dr if you give a power, it can and will be wielded to abuse you. And there should be more limits there.
So who? The jury? The judge? The prosecutor? You would simply have no one attempt to give the death penalty in the case they could be wrong, which is almost always technically a possibility. Which is mostly just the same as not having it.
Yeah, as a concept I’m fine with the death penalty. There are people who absolutely aren’t worth the trouble and should be deleted but we need to do a lot of work on how our justice system functions before it can be trusted to determine guilt well enough for that.
Easy out, labour camps.
Forced labor is slavery, and that’s not ok even for prisoners. Besides being a human rights violation, it incentivizes governments to convict more people of crimes and to impose longer sentences (I agree that sexual assault crimes are under-prosecuted, but that is one of the only categories of crime for which that is true, at least in the US). It also does nothing to promote rehabilitation.
Very good points. My comment was thoughtless.
This is the way.
May I offer a compromise? Send their genitals to the wood chipper and put the rest of their body in prison.
in the name of efficicacy, we should use the woodchipper to remove the aforementioned genitalia.
While I’ve seen my fair share of rapist who got rehabilitated, I do not think this one will be able to, especially as those who do it as a form of punishment (which it was from the limited details) are really hard to cooperate with.
Fundamentally rehabilitation is a two way street. Society has to provide the tools and resources to help change, but the criminal has to want to change and choose to do so. I highly doubt this man will ever want to change.
I hate calling everything terrorism, but raping a political candidate over her party sure fits my understanding of terrorism, same as last year’s political assassination.
Terrorist states love using rape as terror. There’s at least two at this moment, Israel and Russia.